One way to gauge economic thinkers is to look at their citation ranking, as measured by Research Papers in Economics, which tracks who has the most academic citations and uses it to rank the prestige of economists’ work.

Obviously, there are caveats to this approach. It’s sort of like ranking baseball players entirely off batting average and pretending that no other metric matters. Economists can do a lot of valuable work not captured in this ranking system, just like Nolan Ryan did some useful things in baseball regardless of his batting average. (Economists will often say they hate citation rankings, but they are all aware of them.)

Some of these economists are just beginning to make their mark (like Roland Fryer, who is still in his 30s) and others have spent most of their careers outside of academia (like Kevin Hassett). The citation ranking should not be interpreted as suggesting that they are not doing valuable things: all of these economists do important work and are thinking about some of the most important issues of our time.

Yet some papers are cited more than others. So with caveats out of the way, here are the rankings:

Martin Feldstein, ranked 13th

Robert Hall, ranked 30th

Ben Bernanke, ranked 33rd

Edward Glaesar, ranked 39th

Luigi Zingales, ranked 88th

Kevin Hassett, ranked 1,385th

Melissa Kearney, ranked outside of the top 2,000, but within the top 6% of all economists.

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